


The Next Best Thing to an Angel

by Prochytes



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/F, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-24
Updated: 2019-02-24
Packaged: 2019-11-05 00:12:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17908364
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Prochytes/pseuds/Prochytes
Summary: Penance is a dish best served with cereal.





	The Next Best Thing to an Angel

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for _Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D._ to 5x22 “The End”. Raina quotes from _Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There_ , by Lewis Carroll. Angst, dark themes, and references to canonical character death.

The stranger at breakfast was a slight and shapely woman. Her body (visible, just, behind all the cereals) was built on spare but graceful lines. A passing poet might have thought that whatever gods had a hand in putting her together showed a happy knack for economy of expression.

Ruby Hale wasn’t a poet. Looming in front of the table hadn’t worked; the stranger’s limpid gaze stayed trained upon her grapefruit. Ruby pulled off the headphones with ostentatious languor.

“It’s kind of a dick move to take _everything_ from the breakfast bar,” she said.

The stranger poured a slow draught of orange juice before raising her head. “I’m sorry,” she replied. “There wasn’t anyone to ask whether I shouldn’t.” The dark eyes finally lifted. “But that’s the point, of course.”

“What do you mea…?” Ruby stopped short, and grimaced. The stranger smiled.

“Oh dear,” she said. Her tone oozed sympathy, like syrup from a waffle. “You just forgot the script. The mark’s the one who should want to ask the questions. I fetch up here expecting _something_ \- torture, maybe, or an attempt to flip me - but all I find’s a breakfast bar. So I’m over-confident, because, well, no needles under the finger-nails – at least, not yet. But I’m also off-balance, because the breakfast bar makes no sense. Maybe that cute girl who’s just marched through the door knows what’s going on. But she has headphones in, and she ignores me. I’m more off-balance than ever… unless, that is, I don’t play along. How many don’t?” She sipped the juice. “I bet Coulson didn’t.”

Ruby’s eyes narrowed. “Very few.”

“I have to hand it to you: as groundwork for a grift, that’s pretty slick. I should know.”

“If you know about Coulson, you’re not one of our inmates. That means you’re either Management,” Ruby watched, as the stranger sprinkled sugar on her grapefruit, and thought of chakrams, “or S.H.I.E.L.D..”

“Neither.” The stranger brought a sort of leisurely precision to the task of eating grapefruit, excavating segments so carefully as to leave the feathery radii intact. “This place belongs to me.”

Ruby snorted. “You’re chowing down in the custom bunker of the original ancient conspiracy, lady. We don’t rent.”

“I should have borne that in mind when I was telling your neighbours to keep the noise down.”

“We don’t have neighb… Look, fine. You’ve won your little mind-game. Good for you. I’ll leave you to your suggestive grapefruit.”

“Why?”

Ruby floundered. “I have places to be.”

“No, you don’t. Usually, you have to march out of this room, ignoring the mark, for the grift to work. This time, there’s no point. Your gas-lighting’s already sputtered out.” The stranger dabbed at her lips with a napkin. “Haven’t you ever wondered how good the full breakfast really tastes?”

“My mom wouldn’t like it.” Hale was as alert to excess carbs as to the possibility of conscience.

“Your mom’s not here. Sit with me.”

Ruby stared appraisingly at the stranger, before pulling up a chair. “I didn’t catch your name.”

“I’m Raina.”

“Hmm.” Ruby lounged back in the chair and picked a carton of cereal. After a moment’s reflexion, she replaced it, and chose another. “How did you get to be such a smug bitch, Raina?”

“Partly talent,” the stranger – Raina – pushed the milk jug towards her, “and partly application.”

***

“Your being here is somehow connected to Quake.” Ruby poured milk over the cereal. The flakes bobbed and buffeted, before being drawn down to drown in the white depths.

“What makes you say that?”

Ruby rolled her eyes. “Everything is somehow connected to Quake.”

“‘Quake,’” Raina repeated, with a moue of distaste, “so that’s what they call Daisy now. Hardly imaginative. Still, it’s not as though I have the moral high ground. You’ve met her?”

“I’ve fought her,” Ruby crunched down on cereal, “toe-to-toe. Sent her packing, with her tail between her legs.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, she retreated after the bout, anyway. It was basically a draw.”

Raina arched an eyebrow.

“ _Maybe_ she lucked out with a TKO. But I landed some solid hits.”

“I don’t doubt it.” Raina drew her finger around the rim of her glass, sparing Ruby, for a moment, the burden of that lustrous gaze. “Is she still as lovely as ever?”

“I guess. If that ‘athletic girl next door wearing Goth angst like a henna tattoo’ thing floats your boat.” Ruby smirked at Raina’s averted eyes. “It does, huh?”

The finger whittled slivers of keening sound from the tumbler. “It does.”

“Raina likes Quake,” Ruby trilled.

“That’s a truth to which I awoke far too late. An irony, when you consider what I can do. But yes,” Raina looked up again: “Daisy is a woman I could have loved.”

Ruby imagined Raina’s supple slightness arching against Quake’s curves and muscle. “I totally ship it.”

***

“So, what’s a friend of Quake doing here?” Ruby held her headphones absently up to her ear, and frowned. They hadn’t actually been working, even when she came into the room. All she heard from them was that hollow crackle that seems to put a ring round silence. “You’ve probably gathered that I’m not a fan.”

“Really? There’s a poster of Daisy on your wall.”

Ruby shrugged. “Know thine enemy. It’s not foe yay.”

“There’s a poster of Daisy _visible from your bed_.”

“That’s just a coincidence.” Ruby frowned. “How do you know what’s in my room?”

 “Like I said…”

“… This place belongs to you. I’m still not buying that. And you haven’t answered my first question. Why are you here?”

“Because I’m dying.”

“You don’t _look_ like you’re dying.”

“But I am. I’m dying on a bridge, in a place called ‘Afterlife’. I’m not yet serene enough to find that funny.”

“That makes no sense.”

“Neither does a woman who can quicken the pulse of the jaded Earth she stands on. I’m Inhuman, like Daisy. My mind is very powerful, here, at my end. It’s in an open relationship with Time.”

Ruby tapped the hilt of her spoon against her nose. The tide had gone out in her bowl; stray flakes huddled like bladderwrack at the bottom. “Way I see it, astral forms don’t get to guzzle grapefruit. I don’t know exactly what hustle you think you’re working, Raina, but you have seriously picked the wrong place to try it. I’m thinking the near future goes like this. We fight; I win, probably within our next ten heartbeats; and Mom takes you in for questioning. You cool with that?”

“Sounds plausible.” Raina pushed the husk of grapefruit away. “I was never the fighter you and Daisy are. But there’s something quite important you’ve forgotten.”

“I’m all ears.”

“You’ve forgotten that, a little under a second ago, a woman moving faster than a bullet opened up your throat with your own chakram. Karma, if I still believed in that sort of thing. I’m dying, Ruby. But I’m not the only one.”

***

“No.” Ruby shuddered, as memory yawned, and bile climbed her throat. “That can’t be. I was… I was someplace else. And they were… they were in my head, so _loud_.”

“Like I said: I’ve told your neighbours to keep the noise down.”

“All this is in my mind?”

“Call it a condo.” Raina smiled, a little sadly. “‘He was part of my dream, of course - but then I was part of his dream, too.’”

“Why?”

“Penance.”

Ruby snarled. “You banged together this bargain basement bardo because you thought you could get me to say I’m sorry?”

“No. I’m not prey to any illusions about you, Ruby. You are a cruel and foolish child, who maimed for sport. But I…” Raina sighed. “I fed Ian Quinn to the gravitonium. I broke people in two like fortune cookies, thinking I could find a trite transcendence. This isn’t your penance. This is mine. To help, as far as I can, the ones I’ve hurt, by giving you all a little peace before the end.”

“All? You’re doing this for other people?”

“Yes. I’m here for you as I’m here for poor Glenn Talbot, keeping him warm as he floats between the worlds by wrapping him in memories of home. You are so many. And you are all very, very welcome.”

“That is so messed up.” Ruby sat back, and listened to the silence. “But… thank you.”

“It’s the least that I can do.”

Ruby thought back to a duel in the snow-blind wastes, of breath scrawling the bill of effort on the air. “Fighting Quake really was something, you know. I’d despaired of finding anyone to match me. But against her… I was alive.” She looked down at the detritus on the table. “You were right. The cereal wasn’t bad. I don’t think there was really quite enough.”

“I don’t think anyone has ever thought there was.”

“Time to go?” Ruby squared her shoulders, knowing they held only the memory of strength.

“Yes,” said Raina. “Time to go.”

FINIS


End file.
